MARINE SCIENTISTS believe that a leatherback turtle which was washed up last week on the northern shore of Galway Bay may have died from ingesting a plastic bag which it mistook for a jellyfish.
The turtle had been decapitated when found west of the Blackrock diving boards at Salthill, possibly as a result of a collision with rocks while floating into shore.
The 1.4 metre carcase was taken to Galway Atlantaquaria for analysis and samples have been sent to Dr Tom Doyle at University College Cork’s Coastal and Marine Resources Centre.
The abundance of jellyfish off the west coast has been attracting leatherback turtles, an endangered species, from the tropics to these latitudes, and leatherbacks have been found as far north as Scotland, according to Dr Doyle.
“This leatherback would have hatched in French Guiana or Surinam into a baby turtle the size of a ping-pong ball, and has an innate ability to navigate across the Atlantic for jellyfish feeding,” he said.
“We have satellite-tagged two turtles from Dingle, Co Kerry, where they come in regularly, but we still know very little about how they navigate and why they are pre-programmed to feed here.”
“We don’t have the varieties of jellyfish which they have back home, but we have far greater abundance,” Dr Doyle pointed out.
He and colleagues in the centre are currently conducting research on jellyfish.
Leatherback turtles are the largest turtle species in the world and are also capable of diving deeper than any other turtle. They can also tolerate colder waters.
